Alain Touraine

What is democracy

* Introduction The Three Dimensions Of Democracy * A New Idea * Human Rights, Representation, and Citizenship * Limitations on Power * Representative Political Actors * Citizenship A History Of The Modern Democratic Spirit * Republicans and Liberals * Opening Up a Public Space Democratic Culture * The Politics of the Subject * Recomposing the World Democracy And Development * Modernization or Development? * Transforming Old into New * Democratization in the East and the South? * Conclusion

Beyond Social Movements

All of us employ the term `social movements’ in such different ways that our debates are often artificial. Even more clearly, historical analyses of the current situation of any given country and of factors favourable or unfavourable to the formation of social movements are almost meaningless. One must therefore replace this exceedingly vague expression by a precise representation of social dynamics. Without in any way attempting to impose one conception over against others, I wish to examine the historical context of that conception of social life that views it as simultaneously collective action, operation of society on itself, and organized around a central social conflict, opposing those who direct the self-production and transformation of society and those who are subjected to its effects. This conception cannot be identified with a particular current of thought. Rather, Marxist and post-Marxist thought has long been one of the most widespread expressions of this representation. One encounters this representation every time that the notion of social class is employed (at least as this notion is customarily used in Europe), but also every time that society is defined as industrial — that is, by a mode of production. This is the case even when these expressions are in no way associated with a Marxist form of thought.

The Importance of Social Movements

This discussion was conducted with Professor Alain Touraine by Tim Jordan on 20 September in Paris. The discussion has been divided into headings that correspond to the areas of questions that were asked. The social context for the discussion is important in understanding Professor Touraines comments because the discussion occurred 9 days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks but before the bombing of Afghanistan began and with no chance of knowing what would follow.

Sociology without Societies

Sociology is the study of societ(ies): this expression sounds so obvious that it has not even been discussed. Most people have agreed, moreover, that a society is defined by a correspondence between institutions, values and forms of authority, on one side, and internalized norms and agencies of socialization and maintenance of normal behavior, on the other. Very few people today use these words or this general frame of reference, because societies, to a large extent, have disappeared, fallen into pieces or faded away. We are in a constantly changing world and there is no general, integrated process of change. We live in social settings in which the autonomization of various components of social life is so complete that it is useless to consider them as subsystems. Many sociologists are satisfied with notions like mass culture, individualization, fragmentation or dissocialization processes, or are fascinated by a spreading violence, internal or international wars and our capacity for self-destruction, etc. But this approach is too limited, because it is entirely negative. Thus, a high priority for sociologists is to propose one or various images of social actors collective or individual. But is it possible to propose an analysis of actors completely separate from a theory of social systems? This article proposes a positive answer to this difficult question.

Na fronteira dos movimentos sociais

Podemos ainda falar em movimento social em sociedades que chamariamos pos-industriais, as quais muitos observadores chamam sociedade da informacao ou da comunicacao? A resposta a essa questao preside o emprego que os sociologos devem ou nao fazer da nocao de movimento social no mundo de hoje e, em particular, em seus setores economicamente mais modernos. E necessario distinguir claramente, em cada tipo de sociedade, os movimentos sociais propriamente ditos, os conflitos estruturais dessa sociedade que opoem os detentores do poder economico e social e aqueles a eles submetidos, e os movimentos (historicos) que podem ser claramente definidos pelos conflitos surgidos em torno da gestao da mudanca historica. A primeira nocao aparece mais evidente e mais central em estudos sobre a sociedade industrial; entretanto, faz-se necessario descobrir, constantemente, os lacos que unem os dois tipos de movimento coletivo.

Sociology without Society

Sociology was born not when good and evil were defined by what is useful or harmful to society, but rather when this correlation, exalted by the utilitarians, was placed in doubt because individualism seemed to have become a menace to society. This disjunction of the actor and the system led the most radical thinkers to conceive of a system without actors, dominated by determinisms and impersonal powers, and others to describe actors without a system, constructing in a normative void the forms of their interaction with actors who were strangers. Homo sociologicus, exalted by political philosophy, has disappeared. The globalization of the economy, which has entailed a weakening of the social and political controls that existed at the national level, has led in return to the development of identity politics which no longer defend a function but a being, not a project but a memory, which contradicts the evolution that has long defined modernity. We cannot establish a link between the system and the actor unless the latter is defined by the construction of his or her own liberty and not by the playing of specific social roles, and the former as a civil society in which the collective conditions of individual freedom are created. Social solidarity is the condition of cultural diversity, that is to say, the possibility for each person to combine in his or her own way their identity with participation in the techno-economic world.

Les mouvements sociaux : objet particulier ou problème central de l'analyse sociologique ?

Alain Touraine : Die sozialen Bewegungen : besonders Studienobjekt oder zentrales Problem der sozialen Analyse ? Die sozialen Bewegungen sind nicht direkt erkennbare Tatsachen sondern verschiedenartige Erscheinungen, jenach dem Begriff des sozialen Lebens auf den man sich bezieht. Das dieser Studienreihe vom Verfasser und seinen Mitarbeitern zugrundegelegte Konzept beschrankt die Bezeichnung der sozialen Bewegungen auf einen besonderen Typus von Konflikten oder Kampfen, durch den die hauptsachlichen kulturellen Modelle (Kenntnisse, Investierung, moralische Werte) verwandelt werden in soziale Organisationsformen und von einer Macht gepragt sind. In jedem sozietalen Typ gibt es also nur ein zentrales Paar von antagonistischen sozialen Bewegungen. Der Gedanke vom Klassenkampf war sowohl eine erste Formulierung der sozialen Bewegungen, als auch das Gegenteil dieses Begriffes, da er sich auf die objektiven Widerspruchen eines Systems bezieht, und nicht auf den Konflikt von auf dieselben kulturellen Modelle gerichteten Aktoren. Wahrend sie Studie der sozialen Bewegungen nur ein relativ nebensachliches Kapitel darstellt, sofern man sie als Antworten auf die Funktion eines sozialen Systems betrachtet, so sind sie doch, mit alien kulturellen Modellen — Historizitat bezeichnet — eines der grundlegenden Elemente der soziologischen Analyse, wie der Autor sie betrachtet. Die von ihm erstellte soziologische Interventionsmethode gestattet die Trennung der sozialen Bewegungen von multidimensionnellen Konflikten, von denen sie nur einer der Ausdrucke sind, wenn auch der Hochste.

The Waning Sociological Image of Social Life

that a sociology of the crisis is possible and those who believe in the crisis of sociology. I belong to the second category. At first sight, it seems that this second group has a more limited view of the crisis, that they worry only about themselves as if the rest of society was not endangered, while the first group has a more dramatic vision of the present situation, calling sociologists to concentrate their work on a general crisis of our societies and maybe of the whole world. Nevertheless, the contrary is true, the second category takes crisis more seriously: a crisis cannot be complete if at least one point remains firm, sociological knowledge and, as this one is not particularly &dquo;hard,&dquo; if it remains firm, many more elements of social life are likely to be firm too. On the contrary, it is a deeper and more dramatic definition of crisis to say that it reaches analysis as much as behaviour and that it questions the intellectual tools through which we build our experience. To speak of a crisis of sociology cannot be limited to describing the difficulties of a profession. The sociological representation of social life is nothing but an abstract expression of social behaviour itself. Marx, Weber, Durkheim or Parsons are inventors of social life as much as physicists, chemists or biologists build &dquo;states of nature&dquo; as Serge Moscovici says. Both groups of intellectuals produce a culture, that is, build a type of relationships between human groups and their environment. To speak of a crisis of sociology goes beyond all of the definitions of a crisis of society. To speak of a crisis still supposes that we refer to a stable situation, in the same way as we spontaneously conceive of illness as a breakdown of a state of health. On the contrary, if sociology is in crisis, it is because the whole of a cultural and social system is transforming itself and calling for new notions

Une sociologie sans société

Alain Touraine : Eine Soziologie ohne Gesellschaft. ; ; Es scheint selbstverstandlich, dass der Gegenstand der Soziologie das Studium der Gesellschaft ist. Dieser Grundgedanke muss jedoch in Frage gestellt werden. Die Auffassung von der Gesellschaft hat sich unter besonderen Bedingungen herausgebildet, aus dem Zusammentreffen der Vorstellung als Institution, die aus dem 17. und 18. Jahrhundert herruhrt, und der Vorstellung als gewollte Entwicklung der Gesellschaft, hervorgegangen aus der franzosischen Revolution und der Nationalitatenbewegung. Der Gesellschaftsgedanke ist weder verantwortlich fur den Aufstieg der Nationalitatenstaaten, noch fur die Suche nach einer neuen Ordnung uber die Umwalzungen der Industrialisierung hinaus. Heute ist diese letzte Einheitsvorstellung unnutz geworden und die Soziologie muss sich eher als Studium verstehen der sozialen Verbindungen und Aktionen und nicht als Kenntnis des Zentrums und des Einheitsprinzips im Leben der Kollektivitaten.

Sociology after Sociology

The unity of the sociology now termed classical – because it is deemed already to belong to the past – was not that of a theory or discourse about social organization, social actors or the ways in which social wholes change; it was that of an object of knowledge, just as Auguste Comte had wanted. The object of sociology was the study of society and the latter was defined in the same manner as nature, matter or life. In fact, the definition of society was more precise: it was defined as a set of interdependent mechanisms ensuring the integration or combination of mutually opposed elements: the individualism of the actors and the internalization of institutional norms in the service of collective integration. What we call society is the whole which thus combines order and progress as well as individualism and solidarity. All past definitions of society thus rested on the idea that there exist combinations and mediations between elements so opposed to one another that only society, that is to say a set of rules and procedures, can prevent open conflict between them, which would spell chaos. What is this fundamental opposition which defines modernity? It is the dissociation of the objective order and subjective values. In many countries and situations, we have seen the development, on the one hand, of reason, measure, economic forecasting and the organization of work and, on the other, of the portrait and the novel, of history recounted in the first person and, more broadly, of moral individualism. This dissociation of two universes is the best-known definition of modernity, for the latter breaks apart the unity of the religious world in which the creator god was also a rational being. However, the idea of society did not make its appearance at the beginning of modernity. For a long time, it was thought that God had to be replaced by an absolute Sovereign, the depositary of all legitimacy, at once father of the people and manager, generous and a dispenser of justice. The formation of political power and the State was, from Machiavelli to Hobbes and from Jean Bodin to Bossuet, at the core of political philosophy; it later ceased to be so, reappearing only in relatively marginal thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt.